Month: February 2015

The New York Times published an article called Please Don’t Thank Me For My Service. It made me feel like society might be getting better, if we can talk about this: Mike Freedman, a Green Beret, calls it the “thank you for your service phenomenon.” To some recent vets — by no stretch all of…

If there are historians in the future, I’d hope they read this short story by Christy Rodgers about what it feels like to be alive right now. It feels like this: I mean here’s all this data indicating that our species has never lived in the kind of climate that we are creating, and change…

Depersonalization: A New Look at a Neglected Syndrome is very comprehensive without being very long. The topic is “neglected” because it’s nearly as common as depression and anxiety, in both normal and psychiatrically diagnosed populations, but people don’t seem to talk about it much. Perhaps because it’s an experience of ineffable strangeness. It was recognized…

Megan Koester has made an important contribution to Nice Guy studies with I Love Men Because I Hate Myself. I became an anorexic for the reason most women do, because I felt it was the only semblance of control I could exert in my life. I just wanted the world to see, externally, how unhappy…

In keeping with recent “discoveries” that cannabis and psychedelics can be good for you, it makes sense to ask what opiate users have to say about opiates. “Opioid Use Disorder and Dissociation” is a cool paper by Somer along those lines, included as a chapter in the Big Book O’Dissociation. It argues that, for addicts,…

Being a Jehovah’s Witness is not necessarily conducive to good mental health. I can illustrate why, because I got nostalgic and ordered the original 1989 edition of a book from my childhood. Today’s youths have a newer edition: With the end of the world right around the corner, today’s youths face important questions. I love…

Yanis Varoufakis: The great difference between this government and previous Greek governments is twofold: We are determined to clash with mighty vested interests in order to reboot Greece and gain our partners’ trust. We are also determined not to be treated as a debt colony that should suffer what it must. The principle of the…

Lacan is often compared to a Zen master by Lacanian people, since he said nonsensical things that supposedly contained hidden truths, and he behaved in socially unacceptable ways. Noam Chomsky called Lacan “a perfectly self-conscious charlatan” and he’s often compared to a cult leader, etc. In Schneiderman’s book, there are some anecdotes in which Lacan…

Probably because I spent so much time around rats, I find reductive explanations of things appealing. Fruit flies find alcohol more appealing after sexual frustration. Are humans deeper than Drosophila? In that light, I thought this was an amusing paper: Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding. Humans devote 30-40% of speech output solely…

Frank Mankiewicz, George McGovern’s campaign manager, called Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 the “least factual, most accurate” account of the election. Jacques Lacan quotes are often like this. For example: There is no other resistance in analysis than that of the analyst. People that could be called schizoid, avoidant,…